Decolonizing Disaster

O’CONNELL, Caela (UNCCH) Unmoored: The Unmaking of Our 
Environmental Futures After Disaster. What happens to ongoing 
environmental conservation initiatives when disasters strike and 
how does this disrupt socio-environmental futures? If a modeler’s 
goal is to be able to say what will happen efficiently and accurately, 
mine is the inverse. I aim to take what is known and has happened 
already— the legacy of underlying inequalities and extraction 
and un-model it. In doing so, I am imagining the infrastructure, 
community, and culture of a future time that could be radically 
different by leveraging the power of the anthropological lens to 
demonstrate fictive un-made futures as a way to ensure they 
never come to be. caela@email.unc.edu (TH-77)